Jets have the defense to vex Vikings
Quinnen Williams #95 of the Jets celebrate his third quarter sack against the Buffalo Bills with teammate John Franklin-Myers #91 at MetLife Stadium on Sunday, Nov. 6, 2022. Credit: Jim McIsaac
Just about everything the Jets had to say about the Vikings on Wednesday was complimentary. Some of it perhaps a bit too much.
“They’re damn good,” Jets coach Robert Saleh said of the team that seems to have it all, particularly on offense. With a stable quarterback, strong running back, play-making tight end, good offensive line and, most glaringly, two dynamic wide receivers, Minnesota is about as complete a package as the NFL can tout these days.
Even rookie cornerback Sauce Gardner was able to grudgingly cough out praise for Justin Jefferson, the receiver he’ll likely be matched up against in a battle of two of the best young players at their positions.
“He’s a pretty good receiver,” he said, adding that his spectacular and universally gawked over grab against the Bills was “a pretty good catch.”
The Vikings have also had their way with the teams the Jets know best, toping not just the Bills but the Dolphins and Patriots.
“They’re 9-2 for a reason,” defensive lineman Quinnen Williams said.
There are also are two big reasons why they aren’t 11-0. Those would be the Eagles and the Cowboys, teams that have so far managed to keep the Vikings from their pillaging ways. Philadelphia beat them in Week 2, 24-7, and Dallas crushed them just two weeks ago, 40-3. In every other appearance this season Minnesota has averaged 28 points per game.
Both times it was a fast, swarming, physical defense that was able to top the Vikings from reaching the end zone with their usual regularity.
Defenses like the one the Jets are sporting these days,
Gang Green's 'D' is undisputedly one of the best in the league, ranking fifth in yards allowed per game and fourth in both interceptions and points allowed. They’re also in the top five in sack percentage, an important element when it comes to disrupting the passing game. They are decimal points apart from the Cowboys and Eagles in those categories.
And they keep getting better.
“We can take it to another level,” Gardner said.
They’ve stopped Josh Allen and Aaron Rodgers.
Now they will try to stop Kirk Cousins. They have the blueprint to do it, too.
As “damn good” as the Vikings have been this season, they’ve also shown that they can be rattled, roughed up and eventually beaten. It’s rare. It’s only happened twice in the regular season.
The Jets have the crew to make it a third on Sunday.
The way that Dallas game unfolded is probably the way the Jets will try to go about things. Micah Parsons kicked it off with a strip sack on the first play of the game and the Cowboys went on to bring Cousins to the turf six more times. They did it mostly with a four-man rush that allowed them to drop multiple players into coverage, clog the lanes, take the pressure off one-on-ones against Jefferson and Adam Thielen, and force Cousins to make quick, uncomfortable reads.
Williams said he has been watching a lot of film on the Vikings and mentioned the Cowboys and Eagles games as large volumes in his study sessions. He said he paid particularly close attention to Fletcher Cox of the Eagles since they play similar positions. The Jets have also watched how the 49ers played the Vikings way back in the preseason. That’s Saleh’s old team with a lot of similar threads that he brought here. The Niners won that game 17-7. It was an exhibition, yes, but also one of just four times this season the Vikings have taken the field and been held to under 20 points.
That Cowboys game which feels like ages ago but was only on the other side of Minnesota’s Thanksgiving night win over New England was so ugly it was actually yanked off network television late in the encounter to give viewers something more entertaining to watch. Saleh, though, described the lopsided Dallas game as a one-off outlier.
“Sometimes it’s one of those days, but I don’t think it’s indicative of who Minnesota is,” he said. “Sometimes the ball bounces the right way and things can get out of hand, but their body of work says that Dallas game was more of a fluke than it is a norm.”
The Jets have a lot of question marks but they certainly have the type of defense that can make the unlikely happen again and lead the team to their biggest December win in a decade.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
